Jennifer Calienes from Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts called me when I was packing to travel to Japan to consider being the first CFA Virtual Artist in Residence. In New York City, my home since 1976, coronavirus infection had erupted and the exponential rise of COVID-19 was about to happen. My performances and residencies had been cancelled. I am grateful for the prospective of having some viewers's eyes and minds so I will have a reason to continue working.

I invited Allison Hsu to assist me in this residency. She was a CFA intern as well as one of my students and has worked as my assistant since last year. I also consulted with DonChristian Jones and Iris McCloughan, my Duet Project collaborators.

Recognizing the lack of collaborators and equipment, I decided to start the work of this creative residency by revisiting footage from other residencies, my 2017 Rauschenberg Foundation residency and my 2019 UCLA residency.

Photo by Bonnie Brooks

I finished the first piece, a re-edit of Room. I also read about Rauschenberg's war time experiences and inquire more details to the Rauschenberg Residency’s director and archivist. I consulted with Jennifer and Allison, and we decided to write personal emails to friends inviting each of them to see the video and respond. Allison began collecting and archiving the responses.

William Johnston invited me as a guest to a course he is teaching on the history of disease and epidemics. I talked about my own experience of the coronavirus pandemic in China, Japan, and New York City. I also reflected on the way one’s personal attended death is lost when they are killed by massive violence, whether it be war, environmental disaster, or a pandemic.

I spoke with Bill T. Jones about our respective work, Dora/Tramontane (which was presented at the American Dance Festival in 2015) and Room (re-edited for Virtual Studio).

My second piece is a re-edit of Visit, which I also filmed in collaboration with DonChristian Jones at the Rauschenberg Residency.

The third piece, Attending, is edited from footage from my duet with Iris McCloughan as a part of the premiere performance of The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable at American Dance Festival in 2019. This edit is not splicing footage but rather an attempt to transform performance footage into a more abstract and elemental media work. The soundscape was created in collaboration between me and musician David Harrington. I have long regarded a performance as a practice of dying.

After seeing Room and Visitor, William Johnston (who was also with me at the Rauschenberg Residency) sent me photographs taken in the same space. The fourth work, Another Day, is a video made from these photographs and set to a soundscape that I created in collaboration with musician David Harrington.

Nora Thompson continued her project, Centipede, as part of my Virtual Creative Residency. She began the project as a student in my class, responding to a quote by Kyoko Hayashi—”There was a kind of intimacy about this scene of river and people, as if the running water were a giant centipede and the people its legs”—by creating a landscape of bodies that continuously grows. Centipede explores how large numbers like death tolls and statistics dehumanize their subjects while also attempting to enliven each lost individual.

On May 1, Nora Thompson livestreamed her drawing Centipede on Facebook and Instagram from 8:30-9:30am EST. Viewers joined to watch/witness the process in real time.

Fish House is the fifth work I edited for Virtual Studio, using footage from my 2017 Rauschenberg Foundation residency, and the first piece I made without me in it. DonChristian carries a lot of me in it. I believe he was a sophomore when he was in my class, a long many years for him.

William Johnston invited me again as a guest to another section of his class on pandemics. 3pm class means 4am in Japan. This time, in addition to talking to them about my experiences with coronavirus in three countries, I asked the students to look at this site for my virtual creative residency. This is the first group whom I invited to visit my studio. My plan is to use the contents of my virtual studio for the coming Zoom teachings both in Japan and in the US.

Photo by Jennifer Calienes

I worked with Iris McCloughan over Zoom and edited an excerpt from the footage from this session, “Your Morning is My Night”. Iris is in their studio in Brooklyn, NY and I am in a suburb of Tokyo, Japan 6761 miles away.

In November 2019, I worked with collaborators John Killacky and Brian Stevenson on a video entitled Elegies, in which John and I are speaking to our dead mothers. Elegies was featured in an exhibition at Helen Day Art Center entitled Love Letters. On May 6, Rachel Moore, the director of Helen Day Art Center and the curator of “Love Letters”, interviewed the three of us about creating Elegies.

Dani Smotrich-Barr, the Arts & Culture Editor of the Wesleyan Argus, interviewed Allison Hsu and me about our work on Virtual Studio.

Dani is a sophisticated writer with a sharp mind to see. I am grateful for her article. Despite the pandemic, I see so many try to continue their work in their new environment.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa interviewed me as part of her "Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation" series. In usual interviews, I almost always manage to be misquoted. But in a written interview, I cannot blame my pronunciation for being unclear. So I struggled on this writing assignment. But now done, I am grateful for her invitation. I feel I have a clearer grasp of where I am, time and place-wise. And it was good to write imagining my New York dance friends.

Photo by Axel Jenson

The Kitchen featured videos of Eiko & Koma’s 1981 performances of “Trilogy” and “Nurse’s Song” in their Video Viewing Room. My young collaborator DonChristian wrote an essay responding to the works titled “On Boundaries”. I wrote a letter to DonChristian about revisiting these works and created a dialogue with his essay.

We hosted the first Virtual Studio Visit over Zoom as a way to open up the conversation about this project to Wesleyan students, faculty, alumni, and Center for the Arts staff.

Patrick Scully, a Minneapolis-based artist, invited John Killacky and I to screen their work Elegies and talk about their collaboration on May 29 at his virtual cabaret. Four days prior to the event, Mr. George Floyd was killed by police, protests followed, and the night before this event, the police building was set on fire. It was under this tension that this presentation took place.

Photo by Jean Cross

Inspired by the worldwide swell of the Black Lives Matter movement and its demand of defunding the police, I started to study the history of the U.S. police and its violent conduct more consciously. I have been aware of many murders and crimes by police and have joined demonstrations against that in the past. But seeing this history and this swell of people coming out to the street to protest in the pandemic brings urgency.

I began teaching a 4-hour Zoom class at Tokyo University. I use this site as one of the texts. Students are looking at the site and responding in their journals and in class. Four people from my last class at Tokyo University came back to attend as guests and a professor from another school has also joined. It is an intimate but willful group of people engaged in collective learning about movement, art, history, time, and places. I feel it is my privilege to be an instructor in a time like this.

The funeral for George Floyd was held. Kotaro Aoki, my former student at Wesleyan, came back from his travels in India and visited me. I asked him to witness and record my dance to mark the date. After several tries, I took the footage and edited it over four days to make the work titled June 9, 2020 with my writing/reflections. Both are a part of my on-going attempts: distance is malleable.

I taught another Zoom workshop this time to 22 high school students. Before joining, they saw my very old dance in 1983, my recent installation/performance piece, and a performance on Wall Street in 2016. In class, I shared these residency pages and we talked about BLM and pandemics and other historical events they and I have experienced.

I was invited to participate as one of four panelists at a virtual symposium titled "Art in the Time of Coronavirus” hosted by the Art Center of University of Tokyo and conceived by Professor Okada. In my presentation, I showed this Virtual Studio and its contents, as well as images/videos of my friends’ work in the BLM movement. 470 people registered as participants to the event, and I had some intimate responses from friends who attended.

As always, I edited a shorter video. For those of you who understand Japanese, please see the video here.

Photo by Christopher Duggan

This is the last day of Phase 1 of my Virtual Residency at Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts. I spent the day going back to the woods where I danced on June 9th, the day of George Floyd’s funeral. I wanted to have this walk alone and wanted to make a simple video piece. It has been raining every day here in Japan.

Many pages in this Virtual Studio have been products of this particular time—we all have been struggling with the pandemic and the issues of injustice. I feel grateful that the CFA offered me this platform. Special thank you to Jennifer Calienes, Allison Hsu, and my collaborators and friends.